Something worth reading

can be found

over

HERE

Enjoy it. Or, not.

An actual use for an actual waste

So it seems as though I will have the last laugh, for Miles has foolishly given me free reign to use this space for my small contribution to the expanding realm of human literary culture. Soon my genius will be made available to you, but until then, you're not welcome here. So seriously, go away.

...this stuff is ridiculous.

-FTF

I guess this works now.


Does it? Yeah, I guess it does.

More to come.

-FTF

Guest poster on Strana Chudyes!

Hey, folks. Got two new things up, but they're not mine. Since I'm too incompetent and distractable to maintain a page like this by myself, I've secured a guest, or interim, or substitute to post during the long, fallow periods during which I couldn't care less.

Enter: my good friend from VT, Frederick T. Fowyer.

I've already posted his first two for your viewing, like I said, but soon enough I'll get him set up with his own account so that he can take it away himself. Meanwhile, any words for the nice folks, Frederick?

I think my posts speak for themselves.

You're a man of few words.

Not really.

P.S. I don't look like that.

Sense, as described through nonsense.

I don't think with my senses. I think behind my eyes. Is that why I return to the same spots so regularly, and retrace so often the same paths? So that I needn't revise my own world of symbols and simple expectations?

What is the pain of a biting insect? It has a great and commanding focus to it, such as can make a single, pulsing point out of a while swath of flesh in the mind. It shines, it is like a star, a single shining, radiating point, a vast expanse of nothingness set apart by the light which shines behind it, while it itself is no more than the path to the senses.

What if I scratched a star? Which Itch would it kill? And with what hand might I reach it?

What does a city always sound like? Cars, cars, cars. And people, in their cars, occasionally. What was a city before there were cars? Was it the sound of wooden wheels? Of breying draught animals? Chickens?!

Some sounds, with their persistence, kill our ears-- But it would be arrogance to distinguish which ones.

-FTF

SEX

is overrated!

Which is a lie, pure and simple.

Sex is fabulous.

Sex, food, and exertion are the three natural pleasures. Other pleasures are merely displacements of these three.

Music can only stimulate the memory of past pleasures, not create its own.

Songs and poetry bring the pleasures of the body safely into the parlor of the mind, where they can suffocate, wither, and wilt. One should neither read nor write too much poetry, lest they fancy themselves the vessels for the pleasures of others. And songs sung from even out the heart are merely honey to bait the numbing spider's trap.

(aside)That guy has a fabulous car.

If art is sublimated sex, then poetry is a sort of quiet rapist, leaving broken and ruined men and women wherever it has passed.

Who here would like some sex?

-FTF

Yes I had a po st


Well looks like I'm posting something again. Who'da thunk it.

Communists. That's who.

Soooooo It's time for freestyle improvisation. You CAN'T STOP IT so don't try.

SWINGing through the trees of masive SWINGEing size we find the noble MONKEY who eats, so we're told, bannanas, which is a word with a certain number of n's. LIPS are all around us but only to the extent that we allow them. Otherwise there are only SEAGULLS. Still, the glass in the window lets in enough light that we could probably see the dust on the counter, if it weren't for the unfortunate tendency of light to BEND.

PARISH the thought until it becomes misspelled (or misused, whichever you prefer to believe). The period goes on the OUTSIDE of the parentheses. The card doesn't tell you this, you have to learn it on you own, or from a fortune-teller. Otherwise you can sometimes find a squeegee lying on the street and hit someone with it.

That's all I got for now. I had more, but I forgot it.

Okay! So! Drunkenness!


Now, Don't comfuse this with the promise I made earlier about doing a post on drinking. This is a post on drunkenness, which is an entirely different concept.

So, I don't have that much to say here, except that my hiccups are probably throwing my typing off more than my drunkenness would.

BUT, the thing I really want to say, is that [the person who will be referred to as FRUITAGE] is wrong. This is not to say that he doesn't have some good points, BUT...

[and this is admittedly from limited experience, i.e. having experienced no drugs other than alcohol and caffeiene]

In my [admittedly limited, see above] experience, no artificially altered state of conciousness involves focus. Fruitage's argument is essentially that different perspectives provide focus on areas of conciousness/experience/sensation which are normally out of focus, and therefore help provide a more total frame of reference for reality.

HOWEVER drunkenness, which is admittedly different from other areas of altered conciousness, doesn't help focus on anything. In fact, it scatters focus that otherwise would be available for the evaluation of experience. I'm not going to claim that it loosens inhibitions or alters the decision making process, since I'm convinced that it doesn't (up until the point of unconciousness, anyway), but it does definitely migrate the conciousness out of the central nervous system and into the peripheral nervous system, and part of that process involves a scattering of both inputs and outputs, and therefore the whole of consciousness.

I don't have any more patience for this now, since I'm drunk and tired, but let my point stand. If anyone chooses to challenge me, they are wrong.

And they all lived happily ever after,

THE END

I wasn't kidding before.

Seriously, I'm terrified of tigers. Steer clear of them.

Cigarettes!

What the heck is up with Cigarettes?

I'm pretty sure I've been a second hand smoker for years. I don't smoke, but I've always sort of half-relished the company of a smoker. It's been this way ever since my dad used to take me to Redskins games. One of the greatest things that stuck with me was the smell of the stadium, which of course reeked of tobacco. I remember being simultaneously repelled and attracted, like the feeling you get with a loose tooth or a hangnail, where the pain is unpleasant but you can't imagine wanting it to go away.

Well, not quite like that, because it wasn't entirely unpleasant, nor was it pain. I guess the only real upshot of this is that I would be a smoker but for the grace of God. Without any smoking role models, I never had any reason to pick up the habit (not having any of my own money helped here, too), so I remain a second-hander. I almost started habitually smoking cigars last year, but they bothered other people, and I realized that it was stupid and pointless.

The lesson is, smoke and your children will want to. This is why I want to drink. Because my parents do it. No other reason. And no, I'm not kidding.

Still, what is it about tobacco smoke that is so enticing to people? And I'm not just talking about nicotene. People get addicted to the nicotene, but they smoke for other reasons. Incense is the same way, just minus the drug. But the comparison doesn't really hold up-- comparing incense to cigarette smoke is like comparing tea to coffee. On a certain level, they're similar, but really, they have nothing to do with one another. Of course, coffee is loaded with the drug caffene, so maybe it is just the drug that's enticing. Somehow I don't feel like that's all there is to it, though.

So my other question is when tobacco took this big downward turn. Has it always been this bad for you? Or is it just all the crap that the cigarette manufacturers put in there? It's probably just the case that no one noticed back in the day because everyone died early anyway, so it really didn't make a difference. Black Lung was a more pressing concern. Or bear attacks.

So, I'll talk about drinking next time, since I'm out of time now.

In the meantime, steer clear of Bears. Also, Tigers.

My brain is forcing its way out through my nostrils

But what of that. Here are my thoughts for the day.

One: Birds.
Two: Some typical thoughts on the myth of assumed knowledge aquirement, or 'common knowledge.'
Three: I need sleep.

Two is probably the only one worth reading. Anyway.

One: Birds. Angry birds. What exactly do birds look like when they're angry? This thought struck me last night. I have this image in my head of a bird with a big pointy beak and eyes slanted in a very human expression of rage. But do birds really have the facial muscles to display emotion in this way? Even if they do, why should they bother? It seems to me that I have very likely been lied to somewhere down the line, but I'm not sure where. I know that a lot of birds are angry, like geese for example, who I'm pretty sure are absolutely furious about everything all of the time. But even though I have plenty of (unrepressed) childhood memories of being chased by angry geese along the banks of the Potomac, I can't recall what their faces looked like at the time. I don't think they had slanty eyebrows. I think anger is more expressed through the sharp, open beak. Still, it's just another example of how the popular imagination, fueled by childish notions of art spawned mainly by comics and other non-representative media, skews one's very perception of reality.

I remember once-- must have been 3rd or 4th grade-- in an art class in elementary school. The teacher was trying to emphasize drawing from life, which was hard, because Barney the Dinosaur had taught us all that what mattered was our imaginations. So anyway, we were trying to draw pictures from magazines or something, and this friend of mine, he just didn't get it. He was trying to draw this sort of Asian-looking kid who was hanging upside down (I think it was from an ad for something) and he couldn't do it. The teacher would tell him, "Don't draw what you think you see, draw what you see." But he kept drawing a circle for the head, two circles for eyes, a distended ovaloid for the mouth, and a bunch of spiky lines for hair. If I remember correctly, he ended up completely frustrated by the whole thing. Which makes me wonder if maybe, just maybe, when he looked at that picture he actually saw a horribly cartoonish parody of the human form, and what it would imply about his character and life in general if such were the case.

Okay, so that's one.

Two: Some typical thoughts on the myth of assumed knowledge aquirement, or 'common knowledge.' This comes up a lot with me recently, mainly because I live with quite a few guys who are either very smart or feel that it is very important that they be perceived that way. There's nothing wrong with this in and of itself, but it does lead to the perception that knowledge which is basic to them should be basic to all human beings living in the western hemisphere. This means that any time a situation presents itself where such is proven false, they are baffled and conclude that any individual lacking such knowledge is a moron.

So, for instance, they are appalled at someone who would use a metal instrument on a Teflon pan. Or someone who doesn't know how to clean and defrag their computers hard drive. Or any number of other things. And these are in fact very simple pieces of what are essentially common sense (note that I cleverly used two examples which are both things that I do know, in order to project the appearance that I am as intelligent as the people I reference here) but what is really so common about them anyway?

Many things, like using a smoke hood while cooking, are logically deducible by the presence of a) smoke and b) a smoke detector. Other skills and knowledge sets are not. For instance, how should I go about getting a job? No one has ever bothered to tell me, and yet it's assumed that this is a basic skill which everyone knows how to do. I mean, I can figure out the basics-- ask for an application, turn it in, send in a resume, etc. etc., but then what? What do I do when they get back to me? What do I do if they don't get back to me? This is something that I have never done before.

Now, this is an example which is rather easy to figure out, and I expect to do so with little difficulty. But where the real fun begins, and where the real social ramifications come into play, is where we deal with social skills.

Every interaction we have with our fellow man, with very few exceptions, is more or less scripted. This can range from a very specific script, such as a formal exchange of greetings, to a very rough, reality-TV style script where people are improvising what they say but know their supposed role in the conversation and are more or less sticking to it. So long as everybody knows the script, everybody gets along just fine. However, as maturity develops and people begin to enter into social situations without guidance, individuals are forced to deal with the fact that they don't know what the scripts are anymore. Some of these individuals have models to follow, or, on the other hand, to not follow. This is the family/community-influenced path of development. Others simply blunder in courageously and come out with some set of scripts which, while not perhaps optimal, seem to obtain results. Many of these are horribly flawed, but even these are able to achieve success given that any script can work so long as the other party(s) buy it. This we may call the existential model for development, but it is just as convenient to think of it as a purely random model, since the results are essentially unknown. Finally, the third category of individual is one who, unsure of the appropriate scripts to use and unwilling to venture blindly ahead, seek a low-pressure environment where scripts are more easily found and can be developed slowly over extended periods. Now, many of these individuals react to individuals of the second type, catching to their wakes in a way analogous to followers of the first type. The difference is that the models for behavior are new, and not defined by existing standards. Others stay in isolation or seek the company of like individuals, and form small-scale social models of their own. In general, though, this can be thought of as the limited form of social development.

Now, this last one can be exaggerated to the point that even basic societal standards are simply unknown to the individual. This is unfortunate, but logical. Still, this is nothing more than outcast culture, of which there are many forms, none of which are any better than the cultures they claim to be outcast from. But kh-anyway.

The important point here is that new models are developed only by blundering about and getting people to buy your bullshit. Therefore, the majority of such models may be considered to be amoral or evil, since they bestow almost infinite social power on anyone willing to take a chance at it, and, as we know, power corrupts. Also, the sort of chance that is involved can only reasonably be motivated by a very real perceived reward, so most of the people that take such chances have very clear ideas about what they want and won't let other people's pesky moral models get in their way. Now, that isn't to say that all such models are amoral, but the Darwinian nature of societal models implies that a restrained, moral take on social interaction would likely attract few adherents at best, and thus have little extended influence.

So. The nature of new social models is to be amoral and chaotic. However, established social norms are well-ordered, and generally involve at least some moral overtone. Since these models must come from somewhere, we have to assume that they evolved from the primitive models and found that the best way to gain widespread acceptance was through stability, conflict resolution, and a sense of meaning. The models which best express these traits become more or less entrenched and remain that way. Further flaws are worn out of them by the passing of time-- for instance, feminism redefined the role of women in society and thus rewrote all the scripts at once, making them less discriminatory and restrictive.

So perhaps there is credence in the sayings from every period in history, that hold every generation becoming progressively amoral than the last-- because this is actually true. However, since an amoral culture would never survive, such models always resolve themselves, either by reconciliation with the current model, revolution back to a previous social model, or syncretism with a foreign model.

And all of this happens because no one tells their kids anything useful. This is why every child in America should be taken from their parents and raised by MacGyver. Not only would they learn everything there is to know about physics, they'd learn everything there is to know about relationships that typically last no longer than one hour and climax in a platonic kiss.

That was a longer one, but I hope you're still with me here.

Three: I need sleep. Obviously.